The Intel Celeron...the poor individuals processor..Or is it? Released by Intel for the
sub $1,000 PC market, this .25 micron chip has been the talk of the town for the past
couple months. Hailed as an overclockers dream, its performance has both been praised and insulted.
Now with a simple modification this chip can be configured to run in a dual processor configuration, a realm which the Pentium II ruled without opposition*. This has once again brought the Celeron under fire.

This article addresses the dual capability of the Celeron processor verses the Pentium II in a variety of tests. If you ever wondered if a dual Celeron configuration was a viable alternative to a dual Pentium II system, read on.

Benchmarking Information

Fourteen seperate benchmarks were used as the basis for this article. All of them are 3DSMAX R2 specific. Although a synthetic benchmark can give accurate results, no result is more true then from the program itself. These benchmarks make use of 3DSMAX's own rendering and modeling system, and thus are as true and unbiased as they can be. All benchmarks are run under Windows NT 4.0 SP5 because Windows 98 is not a mulitprocessor OS.
Before running the benchmarks I clean installed Windows NT 4.0, 3DSMAX R2, and the 5th service pack for Windows NT. I then defragged the hard drive and made sure the only program running on the task bar was the volume control. The Desktop resolution was then set to 1024x768x16 at 85 hertz. 3DSMAX was run with Software HEIDI drivers to prevent the OpenGL abilities of the Firegl 1000 PRO from influencing the benchmarks.